By Any Other Name

Names aren't just how others designate you—they are how you come to own yourself

I
once knew a guy who had a knack for vetting baby names. He could imagine the
jeers that might dog a child with a rhyme-able first name ("Lil the Pill") or
an ill-thought set of initials ("Paul Ivan Somerton—'PIS'? Try again.") He once
advised someone with the surname "Chin" not to call his daughter "Isabel." Listen to it: Isabel Chin. IsabelChin.
Is-a-belchin'! No way!

When I first heard this, I
laughed out loud. Oh, those hubristic
parents, thinking they can shield their kid from every little taunt. Then
my partner and I saw that pink flag on the drugstore pregnancy test, and I
understood.

For
nine months, after all, you are the kid's chief environmental engineer: you
decide whether to spike the umbilical meal with garlic, whether to bungee-jump
or gallivant in smoky bars. You can become convinced that everything—your kid's
popularity at birthday parties, her college admission, his future earning
potential—depends on whether you dub the little zygote Caspian or Charles,
Raven or Rachael.

In
our case, we named her before we met her, even before we knew if the tadpole
fishtailing around Elissa's womb was a boy or a girl. We wanted a strong name.
We wanted a beautiful name. We wanted a name our kid would thrill to hear,
whether declared from a podium or murmured from a pillow.

We also wanted to
follow the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of naming after a relative who has died.
That's not as confining as it sounds; modern Jews often give the baby an
ancestor's Hebrew name along with a more up-to-the-minute English version. Great-Aunt Raizel's namesake could be Rebecca;
Pop-Pop Yossi becomes Jesse. The Old World morphs into the New, then yearns
back again: I thought of my own Jewish cohort, classrooms full of Stevens and
Nancys, Lauras and Michaels, now the beaming parents of Sadie, Harry, Max and
Rose, like the pinochle team at the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

"What about
'Sasha'?" I asked one day. Soft but not fussy, sturdy without being harsh. When
I said it, I pictured folds of velvet, an August sky flocked with stars, the
scent of warm apricots, a square of buttered toast. Elissa wasn't sure, and I
felt the same about her first-pick boy's name, "Abraham." Right: the Torah's Big
Man in the Desert, the one instructed by God to schlep himself and his caravan
"to a place you do not know" and, in reward for this vague adventure, become
the father of the Jewish people. It seemed a lot for a seven-pound being to
bear.

But the names grew
on us. Just minutes after she emerged, squirmy and pink, and we ascertained her
girl-ness, we whispered through our tears, "Hello, Sasha Rose Goldberg
Hochman." Confidence and trepidation joined hands. We'd just marked our kid for
good. I imagined the Torah's first couple naming the animals: Impala. Ostrich. Hummingbird. Did Eve
nudge Adam in the middle of that night: "Honey? The cheetah? Are you sure we
shouldn't have called it 'ibis' instead?"

Maybe the
uncertainty was rooted in my own odd name. In Atlantic City gift shops, I used
to shuffle racks of monogrammed bike plates and toothbrushes: "Abigail, Amy,
Anne," but never "Anndee." As an adult, I've grown used to the momentary stutter
when someone reads the message slip—"Andy called"—expects a bass voice on the
phone and gets me instead.

My father once asked, after I'd come out, whether
"all this" was happening because they'd given me a gender-neutral name. Oh,
Dad, I wanted to sigh: I know plenty of lesbians named Susan or Catherine, and
straight women called Pat or Syd. Then again, was it possible that growing up
with an atypical name gave me the courage to buck the crowd? As Allison or April,
might I have been coaxed into conformity, gold-scripted name-necklace shining
at my throat?

When they work,
names are resilient, roomy enough to hold us as we change course, reboot our
identities. We hope our kids will grow into them, and not out of them. And yet,
I know adults who realized that their given names tugged like ill-cut suits. I
was all for it when my best friend Heather became Hannah, when a friend's
child, Shira, switched to Yonah, when my cousin Scott wanted to be called Ian.

That was before I tasted
parenthood's daily bereavements. Two-year-old Sasha, who said "chicken" when
she meant "kitchen" and earnestly counted "fourteen, fifteen … nexteen," is gone
for good. But at least there is a new child—young woman, now—who bears the same
name and occasionally offers up a glimpse of our vanished toddler. If she were
to change her name, I'd feel bewildered, as though a stranger had stepped into
my daughter's skin.

And what about me?
I never wanted to be "Mommy." It felt diminutive, a word whined from the top of
the stairs. We decided early on: Elissa would be "Mama" and I'd be "Ima," the
Hebrew word for "mother." There was just one problem: Sasha wouldn't use it.
For 18 months, she called me nothing. Finally, she tested a different name
every day of the week: "Ma … Meema … Mom … Anndee." I responded to each one, delighted
as if I'd won a prize. Tryouts over. She made up her mind. "Ama," she said, and
then it was "Ama" all the time.

The name, it turned out, fits me like a bespoke
shirt. At school, I'm introduced generically—"This is Sasha's mom"—and I have
to refrain from glancing around: Where's the woman with the lipstick and the
minivan? "Ama" sounds like "Mom" pulled inside out, which is how I feel much of
the time. Try saying it: Ah-ma. I
begin the day, and end it, open-mouthed.

In French and
Spanish, the verb for naming is reflexive—je
m'appelle; me llamo—literally, "I call myself." Today, I am "Hoch" to the
colleague I call "Koch." I am "Andrew" to my dear friend Pattie, "Anndeleh" in
the muzzily remembered voices of my grandmothers, "Anndd" yelled from the
kitchen when the phone call is for me. Names aren't just how others designate
you; they are how you come to own yourself, an identity knit through a lifetime
of relationship. The calling goes both ways.

"Ama!" Sasha hollers
from her bedroom. I appear at the foot of the stairs: overalls and mismatched socks,
cell phone in my pocket, lentil soup splotch on my shirt. A work in progress. A
woman who comes into focus a little more sharply each time her name is said.

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